The Londonderry sifter. (South Londonderry, Vt.) 1883-19??, 1887-12-22

VIII al grow UP 10 10 as Gooi as your
father.n Prisons for sins insectte in size,
but palaces for crimes dromedarian. No
mercy for sins animalcule in proportion, but
great leniency for masto1on iniquity. A
poor boy slyly takes from the basket of a
market woman a choice pear--saving some
one else from the cholera--and you smother
him in the horrible atmosphere Of Raymond
Street Jail or New York Tombs, while his
cousin. who has been skillful enough to steal
$4,000 from the city, You will make him q
candidate for the New York Legisature
There is great deal of uneasiness and ner-
vousness now among soma people in our
time to have gotten unrighteous fortunes,
a great deal OF nervousness about dynamite,
l tell them that God will put unler thsir mn
righteous fortunes something more explosive
than dynamite, the earthquake of his omnip
otent Indignation. Ii is time that we Learn
in America that sin is not eJcusable in pro
portion as it declares largs dividends and has
outridsrs in equipage. Many man is riding
hind. To steal one copy OF a newspaper is o
gnat; to steal many thousands of dollars is q
camel. There is many fruitdealer who would
not consent to steal basket of peaches from
a neighbor's stall, but who would not scruple
to depress the fruit market; and as long a:
can remember we have read every summer
the peach crop Of Maryland is a failure, and
hension makes difference of millions of dol
lars. A man who would not steal one peach
basket steals $1,000 peach baskets. Go down
in the summer time into the Mercantile
library, in the reading room, and see the
newspaper reports of the crops from all parts
of the country, and their phraseology is very
much the same and the same men wrote
them, methoiically and UNANIMOUSLY carry.
ing out the hugo lying about the grain crop
from year to year and for score Of years.
After while there will be a corner" in
the wheat market, and men who had q
contempt for a petty theft will bur
commit larceny upon the American corn
crib. And some of the men will sit in
churches and in rcformatory institutions try
ing to strain out the small gnats of scoundrel.
ism, while in their grain elevators and their
storehouses they are fattening huge camels
which they expect after while to swallow.
Society has to be entirely reconstructed on
this subject. We are to find that sin is in
excuSable in proportion as it is great
know in our time the tendency is to charge
religious frauds upon good men. They say:
"Oh, what class of frauds you have in the
Church of God in this day. and when an
elder of church, or Deacon or a minister of
the Gospel, or superintendent of Sabbath
school turns out defaulter, what display
heads there are in many of the newspapers.
Great primer type. Five line plea. Another
Saint Absconded" clerical Scoundrel-
ISM Religion at Discount;" "Shame
on the Churches while there are a
thousand scoundrels outside to where
there is one inside the church, and
the misbehavior of those who never SEQ
the inside of church is so great it is enoug h
to tempt man to become Christian to get
out of their company. But in all circles,
religious and irreligious, the tendency is to
excuse sin in proportion as it is mammoth
Even John Milton in his Paradise Lost"
while he condemns Satan, gives such grand
description of him you have hard work to
suppress your admiration. Oh this strain
ing out of small sins like gnats and this gulp-
ing down great iniquities like camels
This subject does not give the picture Of
one or two persons, but is a gallery in which
thousands Of people may see their licensees.
For instance, all those people who, while they
would not rob their neighbor of farthing,
appropriate the money and the treasure of
the public. A man has house to sell, and
he tells his customer it is worth $4,000.
Next day the assessor comes around and
the owner says it is worth $4,000 The
government of the United States took
off the tax from personal income, among
other reasons, because so few people
would tell the truth, and many man with
an income of hundreds of dollars day made
statements which seemed to imply he was
about to be handed over to the overseer of
the poor. Careful to pay their passage from
Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in
their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from
Paris and half dozen watches from Geneva,
Switzerland telling the custom. house officers
on the wharf: "There is nothing in that
trunk but wearing APPAREL and putting a
five-dollar gold piece in his hand to punctuate
the statement.
Described in the text are all those who are
particular never to break the law OF gram
mar, and who want all their language an ele-
CANT specimen of syntax, straining out all
the inaccuracies of speech with fine sieve of
literary criticism, while through their con-
versatlon 60 SANDER and innuendo and pro-
family and falsehood larger than whole car
AVIAN of camels, when they night better
fracture every law of the language
and shock intellectual taste, and better let
every verb seek in vaiI for its nominative,
and every noun for its government, and
every proposition lose its way in the sentence,
and adjectves and participles and pronouns
get into grand riot worthy of the Fourth
Ward on election day, than to commit q
moral inaccuracy. Better swallow thou.
sand gnats than one camel.
Such persons are also described in the text
who are very much alarmed about the small
faults of Others, and have no alarm about
their own great transgressions. There are in
every community and every church watch
dogs, who feel called upon to keep their eyes
on others and growl. They are full of suspi-
cions. They wonder if that man is not dis.
honest; if that man is not unclean; if there i!
not something wrong about the other man
They are always the first to hear of anything
wrong VultureS are always the first to smell
carrion. They are self app ointed detectives.
lay this down as rule without any exception
that those people VINO have the most fault.
themselves are most mercileSs in their watch
ing of Others From scalp of head to sole o.
foot they are full of jealousies and hypercriti
cisms They spend their life in hunting fol
muskrats and mud turtles instead of hunting
for Rocky Mountain eagles, always for some
thing mean instead of something grand
They look at their neighbors' imperfection
through a microscope and look at their owr
imperfectons through a telescope ups!d
down. Twenty faults of their own do not hur
them so much as one fault of somebody else
Their neighbors' imperfections are like gnat
and they strain them out; their own imperfec
tions are like canels and they swallow them
But lest some might think they escape tn
scrutiny of the text have to tell you tina
we all come under the divine satire when We
make the questions of tims more prominen
than the questions of eternity. Come now
let u all go into the confessional Are no
all tempted to make the question: Wher
shall live nowl greater than the question
Where shall live forever! How shall l ge
more dollars here. greater than the question
How shall lay up treasures in heaven! the
question: How shall pay my debts to man
greater than the question: How shall NEE
my obligations to God? the question: Hoy
shall gain the world? greater than the ques
ton: What if lose my soul! the question
Why did God let sin come into the world
greater than the question, How shall | ge
it extirpated from my nature the question
What shall l do with the twenty or forty o
seventy years of my sublunar existence
greater than the question: What shall d
with the millions of cycles OF my post terres
trial existence Time, how small it Is
Eternity, how vast 1t Isl The former NOR
insignificant in comparison with the latte
than gnat is insignificant when compare
with camel. We lodged the text. w
said: That doesn't mean me, and that doesn
mean me-" and with ruinous benevolenc
we are giving the whole sermon away.
But let us all surrender to the charge
What an ado about things here. What poo
preparation for great eternity. As thong
O minnow were larger than behemoth, 6
though a swallow took wider circuit than a
albatross, as though nettle were taller tina
Lebanon cedar, as though gnat wer
greater than camel, as though minut
were longer than century, as though tin
were higher, deeper, broader than eternit.
So the text which flashed with lightning {